Firestarter (1984)
Directed by Mark L. Lester
Charlene "Charlie" McGee has the amazing ability to start fires with just a glance. Can her psychic power and the love of her father save her from the threatening government agency which wants to destroy her?
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What critics compared Firestarter to
Stephen King novels/films – Stand By Me, Firestarter and IT…
Eleven's initially reluctant ability to use her mad mental powers during times of stress/anger echoed her Stephen King-sired sisters.
The series takes seemingly everything to which Steven Spielberg and Stephen King have signed their respective names, particularly E.T., Poltergeist, The Goonies, Firestarter, The Talisman, It, and The Langoliers…
There’s a superpowered girl, straight out of “Firestarter.”
You’d have to be blind to miss blatant homages to E.T., Poltergeist and Firestarter…
Viewers who remember the extrasensory kids of Stephen King’s Firestarter or Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind will shiver at the setup, pitched between aching parental worry and carefully deployed special effects that fire the imagination.
And John Carpenter's grown-up Starman, and Mark L. Lester's Firestarter, a movie based on a Stephen King novel about parents on the run with their pyrokinetic child (9-year-old Drew Barrymore).
There’s a lot of ways Doctor Sleep could have gone horribly wrong by having a young girl as its co-lead, but when you remember the likes of Drew Barrymore in Firestarter and even Danny Lloyd, you realize this actress had some enormous shoes to fill, but she delivers on all that’s needed to make Abra as interesting as the others.
It’s easy to overlook things like that, except that Air leans so heavily on its soundtrack of ‘80s tunes – thanks to ubermensch Brett Arnold for the tip that Affleck also used bits from the soundtracks of 1984 films Body Double and Firestarter – that it sometimes threatens to overpower all the fantastic performances.
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The second half of Looper is part The Terminator, part Stephen King’s Firestarter.
The Running Man joins The Shining, Pet Sematary, Carrie and Firestarter, among others, that fail in their attempt to please both the masses and King.
It’s certainly better than the Blumhouse’s previous Stephen King adaptation, Firestarter .
This is not the first time King has given us caregivers who betray the trust they are given: Rainbird in Firestarter, Beverly’s dad in IT, Teddy’s dad in Stand by Me, and of course, Jack Torrance in The Shining.
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The flame-throwing kid from Firestarter or the haunted car in Christine can’t compare with Misery’s mutilating, psychopathic ex-nurse, Annie Wilkes.
A critical part of the series' DNA belongs to his 1981 novel It , but also The Mist , Firestarter , Needful Things , Carrie , Cujo and The Body .
At the time King was writing “It,” he was also seeing many of his previous novels being transformed into movies with wildly mixed results ranging from the brilliance of “Carrie,” “The Dead Zone” and (despite his long-standing antipathy towards it) “The Shining” to clunkers like “Children of the Corn” and “Firestarter.”